Violin Memory

Violin Memory, founded in 2005 as Violin Technologies by Donpaul Stephens and Jon Bennett, emerged as an early entrant in the all-flash array market. Stephens, a serial entrepreneur with a background in computer and electrical engineering from Carnegie Mellon University, developed the initial concept and led the company through its early stages, securing venture capital and establishing key partnerships. The company's trajectory included significant funding rounds, such as a Series D in 2012 that valued it at over $800 million, and an initial public offering in September 2013 that raised $162 million.

The firm specialized in the design and manufacturing of computer data storage products, targeting enterprises and public sector organizations that required high-performance storage for mission-critical applications. Violin's business centered on selling these advanced storage systems. Instead of using standard solid-state drives (SSDs), the company developed a proprietary Flash Fabric Architecture (FFA), which consisted of a mesh of NAND flash dies and was managed by their vMOS software to provide data protection and management. This architecture was designed to deliver extremely high, sustained performance with very low latency.

The product portfolio included several series of all-flash arrays, such as the 6000 and 7000 series, which offered features like application-aware snapshots, data protection, and replication. The Flash Storage Platform (FSP) was introduced to cater to a broader market, moving beyond a narrow focus on high-end database acceleration to primary storage solutions for a wider array of workloads. Despite its technological approach, the company faced intense competition and financial difficulties, leading to a Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing in December 2016. The assets were subsequently purchased in April 2017 by a fund managed by Soros Fund Management, and the company re-emerged as Violin Systems. This new entity continued to innovate, acquiring the storage business of X-IO Technologies in 2018. Ultimately, in October 2020, Violin Systems was acquired by StorCentric, a data management software company, integrating Violin's all-flash NVMe technology into its broader portfolio.

Keywords: all-flash array, data storage, enterprise storage, flash memory, NAND flash, low-latency storage, high-performance computing, data center solutions, vMOS, Flash Fabric Architecture, primary storage, storage hardware, NVMe storage, mission-critical applications, database acceleration, storage virtualization, data protection, business continuity, enterprise data services, Violin Systems